Whoa! Where are all these posts coming from? I hope I can get through everything!
John quoted me:
I'm inclined to think that in this case the 9mm has been overrated because of early misinformation and should be closer to a .22, but so many player characters have chosen to carry 9mms that it would be unfair to them to change it, and unfair to you to penalize your 9mm relative to theirs.
Penalize my 9mm relative to theirs? That seems to imply that, because I'm arguing the 357 should be more powerful, you would penalize the 9mm to make that happen. The genie giving you the biggest house in the neighborhood, by burning down everyone else house, sort of.
O.K., let me attempt to say it again.
At some point, someone introduced a 9mm handgun into the game. That was probably two decades ago, before I was involved. Someone decided that a 9mm handgun did a lot more damage than a .22. That is, if we divided handguns into damaging ones with slow light bullets, lethal ones with fast heavy bullets, and a middle category of those whose bullets are either fast or heavy but not both, the 9mm landed in that middle category. Adam has one. Shawn has one. I'll bet John Walker has one. I'm pretty sure Michael di Vars has one. They're all rated "dangerous" because the first ones were.
Now you come along and you say that a .357 is probably a dangerous gun--not as powerful as a .50 Desert Eagle, or a heavy rifle, which are the standard for "fast heavy bullets", and so not a "lethal" weapon. But you say it's more potent than a 9mm, which has considerably lighter bullets. But what your argument says to me is that I've been overrating the 9mm since it first got mentioned somewhere in one of the original books, and it should have been treated as slow light bullets, damaging like the .22s (and I'll note that a .22 pistol and a .22 long rifle are in the same damage category despite the differences in bullet mass). It really bothers you that your .357 does not do more damage than your 9mm--or, put the other way, that your 9mm does as much damage as your .357.
So if I've read this right, the 9mm should be and should always have been a damaging weapon.
It isn't and it never has been, as far as I recall. I've been giving it dangerous category status for a while, I think. It keeps the same status because I try to look up weapons that are similar to others already in play and match them. So I should not have given it the dangerous category, and it should have the damaging category.
So I can go back and tell a dozen players that the gun on which they have long relied isn't as good as they have always thought, and from now on will do only half as much damage, and they should have chosen the Colt .45 or the .357 Magnum or something like that. But that would be unfair to them, because they have come to have a certain expectation of the amount of damage their guns do.
Or I can say, too bad, in Multiverser 9mm pistols do a surprising amount of damage because I don't feel like changing it for everyone and don't think it would be fair to do so, and so John is just going to have to suffer with the fact that his 9mm is much better than he thinks it should be.
Or I can say, since this bothers John so much and no one else cares, John's 9mm pistol will henceforth be a damaging weapon, but this change won't affect John Walker or Adam Keller or Michael di Vars or Shawn Kelley or any other player who has a 9mm with a dangerous rating, because they don't mind it being overpowered; and if John Cross ever winds up in a shootout with one of them (it could happen), well, the fact that their 9mm pistols are better than his is just his bad luck, they must have gotten them in worlds that make better 9mms.
Now, I'm going with the second option, unless you insist I go with the third.
Why didn't you try to make the scenario winnable despite my decision to split up? I want you to know, I'm not arguing. I'm just curious about your reasoning. The Realism vs Good Story argument seems like a referee's thing.
O.K., I'm not really comfortable with the "realism versus good story telling" distinction, from a game theory perspective. A lot of players and referees use the concept, but:
- It's an unreal distinction. It suggests that to tell a good story you have to dispose of realism--that the only good stories are fantasies in which heroes are never injured and villains never succeed. It's a The Last Action Hero kind of world, where the hero's fatal injuries become scratches and bruises. You can tell a good story in a world in which the hero can die, or can lose an eye (Joe Kondor) or an arm (Michael di Vars), or can destroy a spaceship or kill his entire crew by accident (Chris Jones). Risk makes a story better. "Good story telling" is in some groups code for "referee fiat to give plot immunity to player characters", and that means there never really is any risk, and it doesn't matter what you do. I know that's not how Eric runs his Multiverser games--and that brings up
- The categories unfairly pigeonhole referees. Calling me "realistic" suggests that I can't do fantasies and superheroes and other worlds in which what we call realism is in some ways suspended, and I think I've demonstrated that I can suspend a lot of aspects of realism. Calling Eric "storytelling" suggests that he's going to suspend all the rules of cause and effect to enable the players to beat the odds even when they make terrible decisions, and he's noted elsewhere that he does not do that. It isn't even a "scale" between one end and the other. It isn't even as if "realism" means "simulationism" and "storytelling" means "narrativism"--"storytelling" often means "railroading" or "illusionism", and "realism" often means "gamism".
What the question here is is why I didn't change the scenario to accommodate your bad decision. The answer is, I don't do that. Once I've put something in place in a scenario, it's in place. I know that until you know it I can change it, and I've given that advice to referees before; but I would only do that to maintain the intended level of challenge of the scenario, and always when it involves something I have not decided. (For example, if the enemy's fortress is supposed to be impenetrable by the world's available technology and you decide you're going to go in through the sewers, that signals me that I forgot to decide on protections against incursion through the sewers, but that the enemy would not have overlooked that so I have to add those protections now--or else use a game mechanic to determine whether somehow he overlooked what I overlooked, such as an intellect check for him or a GE roll for you.)
You had a chance. The monsters you were to face were deadly, but you would get GE rolls for how many and how often. When you split up, you also had to rely on GE rolls for what happens to the team over which you no longer have direct control. They were tough, but they weren't invincible. The odds were at that point strongly against you, but they were the odds you chose.
You're asking me why I did not vacate your choice. I'll admit that there are scenarios in which I do that--if you're in the Terrorist Tower scenario of Why Spy, you will go through the encounters in the listed order no matter which way you go through the building, because it is structured like scenes from an action movie, not like a dungeon crawl, and no choice you make will change what you face next. On the other hand, you have lots of power over the part of that scenario that matters: what you do in response to those encounters. In the scenario on the spaceship, it was more like a dungeon crawl with a huge wandering monster factor ("good enough" probably meant only one small one, and "better than anticipated" meant it was asleep when you saw it). Your choices boosted the number of encounters while keeping the potency of them the same.
You said you didn't expect the split up. I bet that would be a choice a great deal of players would make.
John, you weren't supposed to be in that scenario anyway--you brought it on yourself, and you created that group.
When I dropped you in TerraNova Habitat, I was going to run you much as I ran Scott Glenning before you. It's a habitat in space. You have to establish an identity on it, get involved in the world, and see what you can gain from it. It's a player-driven scenario: if you turn it into a training and building world, you have lots of opportunity to do that; if you want action, you find a way to get it, probably by equipping yourself and leaving for somewhere else, maybe finding an employer that does planet survey missions or something. There was another player in that world some years back who enrolled in school and was advancing nicely before he vanished from the game.
You prayed for someone fitting Lauren's description to come to your world and teach you psionic skills. I think you probably hoped you would get The Architect, and I'll tell you up front that I really hate it when players attempt to bring supercharacters into their scenarios, because it ultimately means that I have to restructure the scenario to become a challenge for the supercharacter. The Architect is not one of your character resources, and if you treat him like he is you're going to find out that his patience is not infinite. But it happens that the scenario in which I put you was originally written as a gather world in which Lauren Hastings, Joe Kondor, and Derek Brown were the perfect people to face the disaster I designed for them to face (in a novel). Lauren fit the description of what you wanted perfectly--she's even a better teacher than the Architect, and quite skilled in psionics. She also fit that world--but only if the disaster which was the reason she was there was going to happen. In the book, it happened within a week; you managed to forestall it to twenty-five days. But when you asked for her, you asked for the reason for her to be there, and that reason was the disaster that never would have happened had you not requested it.
And maybe that's something you should keep in mind. Senior verses might come when you pray for them, but God never does anything for only one reason, so if a senior verser comes to your universe it's because something is going to happen that requires that senior verser to be there. On the Tropical Island, Michael di Vars has to be there to show the new versers the courage of facing death. In Columbus, the Architect had to be there because he is the only person in the Multiverse who can preach a religion of love and peace to the Dar Koni warriors without being very quickly on the receiving end of their treatment of foreigners. On TerraNova, Lauren was there because she had to try to save the space colony from the incoming ship.
So when you invite a senior verser to your world, you also invite whatever trouble comes with him.
You also needed Derek. Derek is the only person in ten galaxies who stood any chance of getting past the security lockouts on the helm and disabling or destroying that ship in the time provided. Besides, Lauren needed Derek to introduce her to Raeph Williams, who was part of her story.
The person you did not need was Joe Kondor, and that's because you had to be the leader of this group. But you were at a serious disadvantage, because Joe was the member of the team who understood spaceship systems and knew about gravity generators, and the gravity being out on the ship was supposed to be a problem. You offered a solution: you prayed for another verser, one who could teach you to box, and it happens that Claude Winston Beverige III has decent skills in boxing and experience on a spaceship, so it was simple to give him the necessary engineering skill to recognize and correct the gravity problem for you.
But the only reason you had any problem was because you'd prayed for a team; and the only reason you had four on your team is that you prayed for the fourth. If you'd been limited to three, I think there's no way in any universe you'd have split the group. It's not my fault you had four, and it's not my fault that when you were on a twenty-ninth century space habitat you had absolutely no interest in learning about things like gravity generators and life support systems so you had no ability to deal with those problems without help. It was my fault that Joe Kondor was not also there, but then, technically you didn't need him, because you had you and you had Claude, and the two of you together were probably almost equal to him.
As far as other players, when I put people on TerraNova Habitat they don't usually ask for superversers to join them there, so I don't need to create a disaster suitable to the abilities of a superverser. You created a special challenge level by bringing in the big guns, and then you didn't use them effectively because you underrated the challenge level.
MJ, regarding additional damage categories. You said something that one category was 10 points, and the next was 30, the obvious middle ground would be 15, which is too hard to crunch. So go with a not-so-obvious middle ground. Perhaps 20. Still easy to crunch, still gives a new damage category.
Yeah, well, that's not what I said, and I agree that 20 is easy to crunch--which is why it, and not 30, which would be extremely difficult to crunch, is the damage category.
And you know when people say that there's no harm in asking? Well, sometimes there is. If you know I'm not going to like the request, you shouldn't ask it. It just takes up my time.
--M. J. Young
